The New York Daily News reports that John McCain said recently that he doesn't want a follower of Islam to be elected president. That's fine. The Arizona senator, who is seeking the GOP nomination for the presidency, is entitled to vote for whomever he wants -- though he did backtrack later, saying that he would vote for a Muslim if he or she were the best candidate.What ticks me off is that in the same interview, which took place on Beliefnet.com, McCain said, "[T]his nation was founded primarily on Christian principles." While often stated as if it were fact, this is an ignorant reading of history -- or worse, an intentional obfuscation of the truth.
The Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment, an 18th century European movement that embraced reason above revelation as a basis for truth. The scientific method, Classical thought and the human mind replaced superstition, tradition and blind fealty as the routes to knowledge and progress. Maybe the greatest application of such thinking was in the realm of political philosophy, where the radical idea that people should govern themselves moved from the conceptual to the concrete when Thomas Jefferson wrote, "All men are created equal," in the Declaration of Independence and Gouverneur Morris began the preamble to the Constitution with, "We the people..."
Most of the Founding Fathers -- among them, Jefferson, Morris, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Paine -- were deists. They believed, as I understand it, that there is a Creator, but not the miraculous, revelatory being of any of the accepted holy books. Jefferson, in fact, cut up a copy of the New Testament, took out all of the supernatural episodes, and reassembled the text so that it was the story of a wise preacher. In a letter he asked, "Would not Society be better without Such religions?"
There's no denying that these men came from cultures where Christianity was the dominant religion, but to extrapolate that into a bedrock platform that America was founded as a Christian nation is not only untrue, but twists the thoughts and beliefs of men whose actions and words paved the way for us to live here in freedom today.
10 comments:
Hi, Mr. Correale. The most telling words you wrote were "blind fealty." It is my sincere hope that those words have been replaced by "voter decision making" in the city of Boston. It remains to be seen if the blindness of a strong mayoral form of government has been mitigated by the election process. One can only hope.
How many people vote based on who they went to high school with or who shares their ethnic background? Is this also not blind fealty?
Proponents of the Enlightenment argued for fidelity to principle over people. Without critical engagement with the principles of human rights and human dignity, and a commitment to reasoned discourse, the democratic form of government can just as easily lead to blind fealty as the feudal form.
Tyranny of the majority, and perhaps the misinformed as well.
The only blind fealty I have is toward my conscience, and the Red Sox. May God have mercy on my soul.
n.starluna - seems to me that you're under the impression that Carlo went to high school with 2000 Italians. Even if that were true, it's pretty impressive to think that he was able to maintain enough of a connection with each of them to get them all to come out on his behalf!
Perhaps Carlo won because he is the type of person who maintains those kinds of ties to his community. In his quest for personal and professional growth, he has made the concious decision to not only remember where he came from, but to stay here and contribute on a daily basis.
It would behoove you to reach out to Carlo and discuss your concerns with him and how YOU can contribute going forward. That would be a much better use of your time, energy and intellect than spending it lobbing out trite and baseless statements on a blog.
I find it really interesting that anonymous attributes the target of my comments to Carlo. A little paranoid, don't you think? Do you see communists under your bed as well?
Um, yeah, well n.starluna, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if your candidate had won, you probably wouldn't be quite as venomous.
That's simple deductive reasoning. Um - what exactly is the age group and subject you are teaching? I'm a little bit concerned.
the jefferson bible as published by beacon press:
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1678
Obviously some people here need some help in connecting the dots, so let me spell it out for you:
The comment was not in response to the outcome of the primary election, nor was it directed at an individual. To see that in my comment is to follow in the footsteps of J. Edgar Hoover.
The comment had to do with the notion that democracy, or at least popular elections, are somehow free from uncritical (or worse - ignorant) faith, superstition, and unquestioned loyalty to an individual (or their family) that supporters of the Enlightenment believed were a problem. The Founding Fathers (and Mothers) were children of the Enlightenment and embraced democracy as a means for achieving their view of a socially just world. Democracy, and specifically the secret ballot, were thought to enable people to make decisions based on their commitment to principles and values.
The problem is without the ability think critically, without the commitment to the values of human dignity, and without the ability to engage in truthful and reasoned discourse, democracy does not necessarily magically equalize power or result in a more socially just world. In fact, many have argued that democracy creates challenges of justice that are more difficult to overcome because of the appearance of legitimacy.
This concern is quite evident in many of the Federalist Papers. Madison's biggest fear was tyranny of the majority. Madison and many of his contemporaries argued until their death that an uninformed or misinformed public is as dangerous as a tyrannic ruler, and sometimes even more dangerous. This is why, for example, Congressional senators were not publicly elected until 1917. It's also why the president is elected by the Electoral College, and not by popular vote. In fact, you can say that not even the Founding Fathers had faith in voter decision making.
The bottom line is faith in democracy can lead to the same outcomes as "blind fealty".
That may be true, n. starluna, but, so what?
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